Helicopter & Forbidden Fruit

Steel and coal made the big news. But across the nation's labor fronts three other costly, protracted strikes tugged at the economic lifelines.

In New York, after 16 weeks of sporadic violence, half of the Bell Aircraft Corps.'s 3,000 workers were still holding out for a 15-c--an-hour wage hike, $100-a-month noncontributory pensions and other benefits which the company estimated at an overall 62 1/2-c--an-hour increase. Trying out a new tactic, striking members of the United Auto Workers Local 501 observed Ladies' Day on the picket lines. Helmeted, club-swinging strikers' wives attacked three Bell engineers who tried to pass through. Deputy sheriffs, clubs at the ready, promptly arrested a handful of the women, then found themselves engaged in a pitched battle with the husbands. The melee was broken up only after the sheriff ordered tear-gas bombs dropped from a low-flying helicopter hovering overhead.

In Missouri, officials of the Missouri Pacific and its striking engineers, firemen, trainmen and conductors still stared at one another in stony silence. Since the railway unions called out their workers three weeks ago (TIME, Sept. 19), both sides had steadfastly refused to yield an inch. During that time, MoPac had lost more than $12 million in revenue. Most of its customers were being taken care of by trucks, buses and competing rail lines. But in Arkansas, 55 factories employing almost 3,500 persons were closed because of the MoPac shutdown; farmers in the Kansas City area reported heavy losses because of lack of transportation for their livestock. Confronted with the certainty of such distress, the MoPac strikers had refused to work through the National Railroad Adjustment Board, which is established by law for the settlement of just such matters.

Last week, MoPac officials went all out: they proposed that the dispute be submitted to a panel of referees. MoPac would abide by the decisions of the panel, but the rail unions would not have to. There was only one condition to the offer: call off the strike at once.

In Hawaii, the iron-fisted embargo that Harry Bridges' C.I.O. longshoremen had clamped around Honolulu's reef-ringed harbor last May (TIME, July 4) was beginning to rust through in several places. The trickle of cargo that had begun when the territorial government seized the docks seven weeks ago was growing to a stream. Freighters arrived and unloaded autos, Christmas tinsel, cattle feed, canned soup and nylons, left the same day with their holds crammed with bagged raw sugar and cases of pineapple. But when the pineapple-laden freighters hit the U.S. West Coast, their "hot" cargoes found a warm reception from Bridges' longshoremen. At The Dalles, Ore., on the Columbia River, one skipper abandoned efforts to unload his cargo after Bridges' men mauled a pick-up crew of local farmers and cowhands. Trucks were smashed, machinery damaged and several truck drivers beaten up. Other longshoremen began an air-sea patrol to look out for other attempts to land the forbidden fruit. But Harry Bridges seemed to be about willing to talk compromise at last. At week's end, he flew to Honolulu "for the purpose of negotiating a settlement."

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